Frank the Financially Savvy Atheist - The F.S.A.

CD has a post up entitled "PSA: The Truth About 'The Golden Compass'". It already has ~16 comments from both sides of the debate. At issue is the new movie opening soon based on a series of books by atheist author Phillip Pullman. Before I get to the issue I just want to say that I repect CL and have subscribed to his feed for some time now. I enjoy his articles and find them very well written. I would like to think of this as a disagreement between peers or colleagues which is why I titled my post "Respectfully Disagreeging".

In the post he copies a synopsis written by a church associate where they mention that Phillip Pullman is an atheist (actually a militant atheist, why are we always militant :P). He also quotes Pullman as stating that:

[Pullman] left little doubt about his intentions when he said in a 2003 interview that “my books are about killing God.” He has even stated that he wants to “kill God in the minds of children”. It has been said of Pullman that he is “the writer the atheists would be praying for, if atheists prayed.”

Ok, all fine and good and I'm sure that Pullman actually said those things. But then CL makes this statement: "I understand that “The Chronicles of Narnia” could be portrayed as the same devious method of implanting the idea of God in the minds of children, but as a Christian, I accept that method." This lead me to leave a comment.

Here is the comment I left on the post:

Clever Dude,
“I understand that “The Chronicles of Narnia” could be portrayed as the same devious method of implanting the idea of God in the minds of children, but as a Christian, I accept that method.”
I’m sorry but I must respectfully disagree with that statement as it seems very hypocritical to critize The Golden Compass but accepting Narnia. Why is one OK, but not the other?

Additionally, I would reserve judgement on the movie until one actually sees it. My wife and I saw the Chronicles of Narnia and while the Christian undertones were there (i.e. Lewis’s Lord, Liar or Lunatic argument), it was still an enjoyable fantasy movie. Not great, but still enjoyable.

I’m hoping that this movie will be the same but it could very well suck. Plus, I don’t see how one could consider this a “devious marketing attempt”. Nothing you pointed to marks it as such. Yes, the author is an atheist, but that’s pretty much the only piece of evidence you give for your assertion.

Moreover, as we all know, a movie and a book can be strikingly different.

A few more points:
- Why does there need to be a PSA about this? It almosts feel like those people who would hand out flyers in front of the Da Vinci code to let us know that it was fiction. Really, I could never have guessed? One of the best retorts to this came from Roger Ebert when he said: "I know there are people who believe Brown's fantasies about the Holy Grail, the descendants of Jesus, the Knights Templar, Opus Dei and the true story of Mary Magdalene. This has the advantage of distracting them from the theory that the Pentagon was not hit by an airplane". Absolutely hilarious.
- Some of the comments people were leaving both in favor and against the post were annoying. I found rational being (comment #3) midly annoying, but I also found Mrs. Micah's (comment #6) response annoying as well. Can we please stick to the facts at hand rather than delving off into sticking your head in the sand or atheism is a faith as well, lol. Sheesh. Even Jon (comment #14) made some really cogent points with respect to other Christians who are in support of the movie, before then delving into a "I'm not going to subscribe to your feed anymore". That's really too bad because he made an excellent point and was adding to the discussion.


However, I must give CL some credit, he is reading the series for himself and said he will probably see the movie. Props for that. That's more than what most Christians will do.

I look forward to reading more from you as I won't be unsunscribing from your blog anytime soon. That is, unless you start writing crappy financial posts :P.

With the purchase of two new cars, debt has been on my mind a lot recently. So I wanted to break down our debt with some of those cold numbers I mentioned before.

First some aggregate statistics:

• Total Debt: Over $300 thousand


• Weighted Average Cost of Capital Debt: 4.74%.


• Weighted Average Cost of Capital Debt sans Mortgage: 4.73%


• Weighted Average Cost of Capital "Good" Debt: 4.93%


• Weighted Average Cost of Capital "Bad" Debt: 4.18%


• Leverage Ratio: Total Debt/Gross Income --> 2.5x


• Highest Interest Rate: Wife's student loans at > 6%.


• Two Lowest Non-Zero Interest Rate: 1.99% Intro APR on credit card and 3.99% permanent APR on balance transfer card

Here's how our debt is currently broken out:



As you can see, I'm calling our mortgage debt and our student loan debt, "good debt", while everything else is "bad debt". So our total bad debt is 25% of our total debt burden. However, that is really driven by our mortgage which makes up the majority of our outstanding debt. If I take out our mortgage, this is what our debt picture looks like:



So now without the mortgage we have more bad debt than good debt.

Up next, how to pay this all down, the plan of action.

A while back there was a story on Oprah making the rounds in the pf blogosphere about this woman named Felice. She was spending $400/month at Starbucks, the family was over $100,000 in debt and her kids had no health insurance. Pretty crappy financial situation by any measure. They had Suze Orman on to help them and I notice something peculiar in her advice. She started off by saying this to Felice:

I personally don't believe you're selfish. I think you're selfless. I think because you don't have a self, because you don't know who you are…that is why you're doing these things that you are doing. You are just simply trying to find yourself

Notice anything about those sentences (other than the new agey feel to them)? There are no numbers what so ever. Here we have people in a dire financial situation and Suze's concentrating on (seemingly) unimportant things like a definition of self! For me, finance is all about the cold numbers or the cold equations. You have some variables like interest rate, principal to pay down, capital to accumulate, expenses. You plug those numbers into equations to calculated debt payoff, how much will you have by this time, and what to budget for in a given month. All numbers and equations. Why was Suze starting in such a place instead of focusing on this family's large numbers?

As I often do, I was sharing this story with my wife and I highlighted my observations about the lack of numbers. Her response was, "Well,of course you start there with the emotional side. It's about what the money represents to her. She's buying those things because she is trying to define herself."

I was struck by her statement. Hearing my wife say that really drove the point home. Personal finance will always be more that just about the numbers. You can't separate the emotional side from it. This is something that I struggle with all the time. For me it's just the numbers say this, the math works out to that, and that determines our course of action. That's why I poo-pooed Dave Ramsey's debt snowball method with my "true debt method". Now, you can't divorce your personal finances from the numbers completely otherwise you'll end up where Felice is, but at the other end of the spectrum, divorcing emotions from your finances can lead to other problems, namely unhappiness with life or being unsatisfied. Like many things in life, a balance is needed. I do not have that balance and I feel that I swing from one extreme to the next sometimes. Perhaps it's just a sign of my immaturity and or naiveté. Man, I really need to reconsider my moniker of financially savvy.

test completed

In my last post I was ranting and bitching about the series of unfortunate events that have transpired this past month. Now it's time to tally the damage and see how we've fared so far. Once again it's been a month where bills have come and gone and not much else has transpired. About the only positive financial decision we've made so far is to open a high yield checking account. Other than that, we've have only been paying bills as they've come due. Let's take a look at the numbers.

Assets were up 900 bps this month. This was almost entirely due to the purchase of our new Honda CRV. Our 401(k) balance was up MoM, but due to the recent volatility, almost only due to contributions and very little market appreciation.

On the liabilities side we saw a jump of 1133 bps. Once again the car is a large part of that increase in liabilities, plus some credit card debt.

All told that brings our net worth to (9,710). Such a painful negative number.